Patrick Meidl

When switching from OS X to Ubuntu, one of the features I missed most was a good replacement for iTunes. Neither Banshee nor Rhythmbox made me feel comfortable. Last week, Songbird 1.0 was released. I had tried v0.7 before and it looked promising, so I was exited to try out the first stable release.

Just before the beginning of the double Darwin anniversary (in 2009, it will be both his 200th birthday and 150 years since publishing the Origin of the Species), we are back in Galapagos. We will continue Sabine's research on the cognitive abilities of the Darwin's finches. This year, there will also be behaviour observations on radio-tracked birds in the wild, and I'm in the process of writing a java program (working title "Observalizer") to record and analyse the behaviour data. We bought three Asus Eee PCs which we will strap onto tablets in front of our bellies to do the event recording - hope this will work.

After 3 years of engagement and being together for 12 years, we thought that it's about time to say "yes": Sabine and I finally got married on the 27th of September. We had a wonderful wedding with our families on Schloss Bernau in Fischlham, Austria, and we plan to have a big party with all our friends early next year. Here you can find all the pictures from the big day.

When I got my new Dell XPS 1530 laptop, I decided to give the pre-installed Window Vista a try. But not surprisingly - after working on *nix OSes (Redhat, Debian, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, OS X) for 6 years - it soon became clear that there was no way back. So I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04 on it.

We are finally back in Austria, after living in Cambridge, England and St. Andrews, Scotland for the last 6 years. Living in the UK was a great experience, it was very interesting to be part of a different culture (and yes, it was different!), and in terms of my career it is invaluable how much I learned at the Sanger Institute and the EBI. Nevertheless, we missed our own culture, our families and our friends, so are very happy to be back in Vienna now where we both lived before. For Luca, it's the first time to live in Austria, hope he likes it too.